Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 15:50:37 +0000 From: Alan Judge <Alan.Judge@indigo.ie> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org, freebsd-smp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Seeking recommendations/stories for big servers Message-ID: <19991122155057.8375E14BD2@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: Message from Joerg Micheel dated Wednesday at 18:24.
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Joerg> I'd be interested to hear some experience/stories from people running Joerg> such systems. I can't really comment on the SMP issue, but we've been quite happy with the Dell servers (4350 and 2300s mostly). Fast, run FreeBSD well, with good LVD SCSI drives, the I/O screams. Dell do nice rack mount servers up to 8 processor. An 8450 with the 64-bit Adaptec 3950U2W cards and external shelves of LVD drives would probably fly. Alternatively, though I haven't tried it, fibre channel with the Qlogic cards might work better. It depends what you are optimising for. Dell do nice external disk shelves, but I have little experience with them; we use Network Appliance filers for all our large storage needs, something you might also consider, depending on what you want and can afford. We did have problems with SMP hangs in stable a while back, but I haven't tested in a while (we only use UP boxes in production, so the SMP stuff is just for testing). Given that FreeBSD still uses a single big lock for the kernel, your applications would need to be very CPU intensive to make much use of lots of processors. An I/O loaded application might be just as fast on a single processor box. I've had bad experiences with Compaq kit being non-standard in the past, but the Digital stuff might be OK. Joerg> I'm also interested about network-fanout stories. We may Joerg> NFS-mount the server and have a 100MBit Ethernet box behind it Joerg> for access from a farm of PCs. The Intel PRO/100 cards are great for 100Mb, but almost any of the Dell boxes will easily max one out for NFS and file transfers. You might want to consider either Gigabit ethernet or multiple 100Mb cards if you want really fast access from lots of clients. -- Alan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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